The Image Top 100 Books of the Century

We seem to mystify people who are slaves to their
pleasures. we often work too hard and rest too
little, our food is plain, our days are without
variety, we have no possessions nor much privacy, we
live uncomfortably with our vows of chastity and
obedience; but God is present here and that makes
this our heaven on earth.
-Mother Superior to Mariette,
Mariette
in Ecstasy

In this spare novel Ron Hansen succeeds brilliantly at what must surely
be one of the most difficult tasks for any writer : he makes the miraculous
plausible. In so doing, he raises fascinating questions about how
we would react to miracles, were we to witness them, and about why those
miracles might occur.

In 1906, seventeen year old Mariette Baptiste enters an upstate New
York convent, joining the order of The Sisters of the Crucifixion.
Pretty, pious, and personable, she quickly becomes the darling of the place,
even though these same traits, and the fact that the Mother Superior is
her sister, inspire some jealousy and even forbidden lusts. Since
her confirmation, at age thirteen, Mariette has had a calling and has heard
the voice of Christ speaking to her, preparing her for some great events.
So she, and some of the nuns who love her, are prepared when, upon the
death of her sister, Mariette is afflicted with stigmata. But others,
particularly those who have resented her anyway, are less willing to accept
the miraculous nature of these happenings, suspecting Mariette of an attention-seeking
hoax. And when the wounds are healed just as suddenly as they appeared,
both sides see this as confirmation of their own, very divergent, beliefs.

Hansen recreates the atmosphere and daily life of the convent in convincing
detail. He allows the remarkable occurrences to speak for themselves
for the most part, and allows just enough wiggle room for more dubious
readers to question whether Mariette is a saint or a charlatan. One
of the most unlikely facets of the story, for a believer, is that this
young girl in the middle of nowhere would be chosen as the recipient of
these manifestations of God's presence. Equally perplexing is why
these signs should be made so ambiguous and left open to doubt. Hansen
answers these questions as Mother Saint-Raphael explains to Mariette why,
even though she personally believes in Mariette, she is willing to let
the matter be dismissed by church officials :

Skeptics will always prevail. God gives us
just enough to seek Him, and never enough to fully find
him. To do more would inhibit our freedom,
and our freedom is very dear to God.

This idea, that God purposely leaves the decision of whether to have
faith in the hands of men, rather than to force them to believe, is fundamental
to the view of Man as having Free Will. Of course, it can also be
easily ridiculed as an easy way out of ever proving God's existence.
Regardless of which side of the argument you come down on, this is a beautiful,
thought-provoking, novel about the awesome power, and the inevitable limits,
of faith.